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TIL in 1120 the the captain of the White Ship was encouraged by on-board revelers to try and overtake another vessel on which King Henry I was a passenger. In the dark the ship hit a submerged rock and capsized, leading to the death of Henry’s only heir, which led to a 20 year civil war.

kJ0DE Today I Learned about Project Orion, a project that employed Nuclear Pulse Propulsion, had the potential to travel up to 11% the speed of light, and was shelved in the 1960's.
nWDAW TIL the vampire squid is neither an octopus nor a squid and it's eyes are proportionately the largest in the animal kingdom. If agitated, it ejects a sticky cloud of bioluminescent mucus which is able to stick to predators, making them more visible to secondary predators
6EdjX TIL that prior to converting to Islam, Bosnians practiced a unique form of Christianity that was considered heretical by both the Catholic and Orthodox church.
W7AnA TIL that there's something called "Prevention paradox", which describes the seemingly contradictory situation where the majority of cases of a disease come from a population at low or moderate risk of that disease, & only a minority of cases come from the high risk population (of the same disease)
nWWK9 TiL that upon finishing the sci fi film "Devil Girls From Mars", a then 12 year old Octavia Butler concluded that she could write a better story. Butler went on to win multiple Hugo and Nebula awards and became the first sci-fi writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship.